Journal ArticleDOI
BIRDSONG AND HUMAN SPEECH: Common Themes and Mechanisms
TLDR
Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels, with striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development.Abstract:
Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels. Both humans and songbirds learn their complex vocalizations early in life, exhibiting a strong dependence on hearing the adults they will imitate, as well as themselves as they practice, and a waning of this dependence as they mature. Innate predispositions for perceiving and learning the correct sounds exist in both groups, although more evidence of innate descriptions of species-specific signals exists in songbirds, where numerous species of vocal learners have been compared. Humans also share with songbirds an early phase of learning that is primarily perceptual, which then serves to guide later vocal production. Both humans and songbirds have evolved a complex hierarchy of specialized forebrain areas in which motor and auditory centers interact closely, and which control the lower vocal motor areas also found in nonlearners. In both these vocal learners, however, how auditory feedback of self is processed in these brain areas is surprisingly unclear. Finally, humans and songbirds have similar critical periods for vocal learning, with a much greater ability to learn early in life. In both groups, the capacity for late vocal learning may be decreased by the act of learning itself, as well as by biological factors such as the hormones of puberty. Although some features of birdsong and speech are clearly not analogous, such as the capacity of language for meaning, abstraction, and flexible associations, there are striking similarities in how sensory experience is internalized and used to shape vocal outputs, and how learning is enhanced during a critical period of development. Similar neural mechanisms may therefore be involved.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Social modulation of sequence and syllable variability in adult birdsong.
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that variability in syllable sequencing is rapidly modulated by social context with greater variability present in undirected song, indicating that the nervous system exerts active control over variability at multiple levels of song organization and support the hypothesis that such variability in otherwise stable adult song serves a function.
Journal ArticleDOI
MUPET-Mouse Ultrasonic Profile ExTraction: A Signal Processing Tool for Rapid and Unsupervised Analysis of Ultrasonic Vocalizations.
TL;DR: MUPET (Mouse Ultrasonic Profile ExTraction) software, an open-access MATLAB tool that provides data-driven, high-throughput analyses of USVs, serves as a new tool for USV repertoire analyses, with the capability to be adapted for use with other species.
Journal ArticleDOI
Online contributions of auditory feedback to neural activity in avian song control circuitry.
TL;DR: Recorded activity in the premotor nucleus HVC of singing Bengalese finches is found to indicate that neurons in avian vocal premotor circuitry are rapidly influenced by perturbations of auditory feedback and support the possibility that feedback information in HVC contributes “online” to the production and plasticity of vocalizations.
Book ChapterDOI
The Evolution of Central Pathways and Their Neural Processing Patterns
TL;DR: An important issue in this chapter is the increasing evidence that the elaborated central auditory systems in the different clades of recent vertebrates are to a large extent a result of parallel, independent evolution.
Journal ArticleDOI
Perceptual Systems Controlling Speech Production
TL;DR: This response of cortical regions related to speech production is not predicted by the classical model of hierarchical cortical processing, providing new insights into the role of the STP in polysensory integration and into the modulation of activity in SII during normal speech production.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
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Journal ArticleDOI
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